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• Merry Kitschmas to ALL

  Posted: December 23rd 2013 @10:18 AM

  I like to think of being Jewish as a marathon sport. I can dole out a soul-crushing guilt complex, shot-put-style, successfully match-make without meeting the intendeds and turn dinner for two into a fridge full of leftovers.

  I am Jewish Woman; hear me roarrrrrr.

  And sure, it comes with some issues, but I’m proud of each and every one of them. They were bequeathed to me by David. Yes, right after he slew Goliath, he said, “And now I shall pass down to all the future Jewish generations a strong dislike for plain butter on white bread. An olive, a pimento, maybe a smidgen of herring would be nice, but just butter?” (This is why Jews do not spend a huge amount of time in Connecticut.)

  I love being Jewish! Not that you cared or noticed or even sent a card or some flowers, but no matter … I’ll live.

  Eleven months out of the year, I celebrate, but then what I think of as goyim revenge creeps in. … It starts in November … the loneliest time of years for members of the tribes … the time we are reminded, yet again, that we are, in fact, different … the Christmas season. When Noel rolls around, I feel like the only one locked out of a sample sale.

  “Let me in! I’ve got credit!”

  Suuuuuure. We’ve got Chanukah, eight days of it. Eight days trapped in the living room while your parents discuss the time you were constipated for a week from too much egg salad. (Hey, eating 35 eggs in three days would block up the Hudson River.)

  Eight days when your gifts are doled out agonizingly, one per day to keep you coming back for more. It’s menorah blackmail! Speaking of presents … can I just interject here to say that SOCKS, SHAMPOO, SOAP, UNDERWEAR AND TOOTHPASTE SHOULD NEVER BE GIVEN AS A CHANUKAH PRESENT! These are, um, what parents are supposed to give their kids all year long. It’s just wrong to gift-wrap these things!

  It’s also wrong, by the way, to give your kid a Barbie doll missing one arm from the Grant’s Going Out of Business Sale. No wonder I have issues!

  Christmas always seemed much more merciful. You have a huge Christmas Eve dinner among your loved ones, eat massively, pass out, wake up, open gifts, eat some more and leave. Heaven.

  Sheesh, even when you try to ignore Christmas, it’s just impossible! If you decide to watch television, every single program has some spliced-in Santa element. The closest I’ve come to a Chanukah program on the holidays is a “Twilight Zone” marathon.

  So what’s a Jew to do on Christmas? Yeah, I know, we go to the movies. Last time I did that, I wound up watching “Titanic,” and honey, that didn’t exactly lift the downtrodden mood. I mean basically it was a movie about a whole bunch of rich Jews drowning in a big boat, and worse yet, nobody sued.

  Some Jews get into the spirit, by adopting a sort of morph of both cultures, the old Cranukah spiel, but this year, Chanukah crashed into Thanksgiving and left us bupkis for Christmas!!

  There was something depressing about the Chanukah bush anyway. A Christmas tree adorned with dreidels, Moses statuettes and pictures of Barbra Streisand was never gonna cut it!

  No. To really beat the left-outta-Christmas blues, one must think bigger than Barbra, and I don’t mean Bette … ’cause let’s face it: Bette rocks, but Barbra is still the Streisand.

  No you have to think bigger then even Barbra … I know … the Lord’s name in vain … but I’m on a roll … on December 24th of this year, I will be instituting the first annual Kitschmas Eve.

  On this festive holiday, Jews in leisure wear will feast on a wide array of exotic dishes like kishka, schnitzel, kreplach, latkes and kugel and sip sparkling Manischewitz punch. Dessert will be babka, halvah, strudel, rugelach, hamantashen, a tall glass of seltzer and three Tums per customer.

  Then it’s off to caroling!

  On the first night of Kitschmas, my true love gave to meeeeeeeeeeeee …
  Intestinal gas from eating too much cheese.

  On the second night of Kitschmas, my true love gave to meeeeeeeeeeeee …
  Two Prilosecs, one tab of Advil, three ginger ales and Adam Sandler singing Chanukah songs.

  Well … anyway, you get the point dears. Make up your own Kitschmas carol; my kishkas are killing me.

  So what do we do on Kitschmas morning?

  Eat a pastrami omelet, followed by lox (Nova, only) on an everything bagel with a shmear, give everyone a gift certificate for online shopping because life is short, and spend the afternoon digesting. Heaven.

   

• On the 50th Anniversary of the Assassination- That Which We Dare Not Think

  Posted: November 27th 2013 @4:05 PM

  There probably isn’t an American over 55 years-old who does not remember exactly where they were and what they were doing at 2 PM on November 22, 1963. At this moment, of course, the 35th President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, was gunned down in the streets of Dallas.

  Lest any American, of any age, miss the commemoration of this mournful anniversary the mass media has done its best to deliver it, front and center. This year alone there have been hundreds of new books, movies, TV shows, and newscasts on every conceivable platform, including the  “JFK Twitter Takeover,” an hour by hour account of the event as if it was unfolding live, right now on social media.

  While far more than half of all Americans—60 to 80%, according to various polls— do not believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing the President, the vast majority of these pop culture recreations, including an alternate reality fantasy novel by Stephen King, follow the gospel of the Warren Commission, which has been accused of producing so many falsehoods that a number of them, such as the Lone Gunman Theory and the Magic Bullet Theory have become popular tropes which are synonymous with far-fetched ideas.

  In fact, the assassination of President Kennedy attracts theories of conspiracy precisely because the most basic evidence in the record points directly to multiple shooters. Even the United States House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations, convened in 1976, concluded that there was “probably” a conspiracy.

  The irony is that almost anyone who has presented a divergent opinion has either been ignored by the mainstream media or labeled a conspiracy nut.

  Nevertheless, there are no shortage of them and figuring it all out is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle with a blindfold on. You’ve got so many pieces you have no idea how they fit together because you can’t see the big picture.

  You’ve got anti-Castro Cubans working with a factions of CIA that are furious Kennedy pulled the plug on the Bay of Pigs invasion. You’ve got members of the mafia who made a deal with old Joe Kennedy to help win the presidential election but felt betrayed when Attorney General Bobby Kennedy went after them in court. There are the Texas oil billionaires who stood to lose a fortune if JFK ended the oil depletion allowance. There are members of military intelligence who suspected that JFK was cooling to its commitment to the war in Vietnam.

  And if you’re having trouble fitting all those pieces together there are people who say that one man did just that, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had the motive, the means, and the opportunity to mastermind the plot to kill the president. Johnson, according to a new book by a Washington insider, was about to be indicted by for financial crimes and ultimately dumped from the 1964 presidential ticket. In fact, the night before the shooting, LBJ purportedly told his long-time mistress, “After tomorrow those goddamn Kennedy’s will never embarrass me again—that’s no threat—that’s a promise.”

  I grant how threatening all this is to believe, which is one reason why it’s so easy to deny. Scientists have long marveled at the human brain’s ability to suppress apparent danger.

  And what could be more dangerous than a coup d’état –the overthrow of the government by a small group within the government. It’s preposterous. It’s outrageous. That stuff happens in third world banana republics, not the United States of America. You’d have to be nuts to believe something like that.

  You’d have to think that as citizens we really don’t have a voice. You’d have to think that our government is run by higher powers than our presidents; powers with agendas of their own; and that if a principled president stood in their way, he could simply be rendered powerless…or eliminated.

  If you can’t bring yourself to believe that there are forces within our government that will do whatever it takes to get their way…then you have to believe in a deranged lone gunman, a lucky marksman with a magic bullet…and then the world will be good again and we’ll live happily ever after.

  I’m Ira Wood…and that’s not necessarily my opinion.

  Matters of Opinion are Ira Wood’s short, personal, often rather odd takes on current events. They wrap up the WOMR News on most Fridays at 12:30 PM and are available as podcasts HERE. Feel free to email Ira to tell him what you think.

   

   

• Which header does this fall under?

  Posted: June 25th 2013 @7:43 PM

  Maybe it’s a DJ highlight to you

   

• Screw the Good Old Days

  Posted: April 1st 2013 @6:31 PM

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  Ira Wood reflects on lessons learned from spending a few days without power following some of this winter’s storms.

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• Reefer madness

  Posted: April 1st 2013 @6:28 PM

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  Ira Wood reflects on the status of medical marijuana and other drugs.

  Check out this episode